TAMPA – Seeing Scott Stevens leave last night’s game for good after being hit in the left side of the head with a scalding Pavel Kubina slap shot apparently drove the Devils out of their minds. What else could explain the theory advanced by at least some of the team that the Lightning defenseman had intended to shoot the puck at the Devil captain’s face 1:17 into the match?

“It’s a pretty strange way to shoot the puck,” Martin Brodeur said following the Lightning’s 4-3 Game 3 victory. “I don’t know who dumps it that high and wide, but he hit him in the head. The only possible way to hurt Scotty is to hit him in the face with the puck and that’s what he did.

“There are three ways to dump the puck, but you don’t do it that way. It’s strange that he took a slap shot at him that hard. I don’t know what he was trying to do. It’s hard to say if he did it on purpose.”

Stevens was on the left side at the end of his first shift when Kubina wound and fired from the neutral zone’s far right boards. The rising shot caught Stevens around the ear. After crumpling to the ice, No. 4 was led to the locker room with a towel over the left side of his face. He received stitches to close the wound and then was sent to an undisclosed Tampa hospital for X-rays that were negative. So at least no broken skull.

“Seeing him get hurt that way, it was huge, by God,” Ken Daneyko said. “He’s our emotional and inspirational leader. He’s a warrior for us. The whole thing is pretty tough to take. I probably shouldn’t say it, but you really wonder whether that might have been planned.

“The way [Kubina] made the play, it didn’t look very smart. I wondered about it.”

Really, the sentiments expressed by Brodeur and Daneyko – and you’d better believe they aren’t the only Devils wondering whether Tampa intended to injure Stevens – are astounding, far more so than the Devil breakdowns all over the ice on which the Lightning capitalized to announce themselves as credible Round Two opponents. And when the comments were relayed to Tampa coach John Tortorella, he was nearly dumbstruck.

“You can’t be serious,” an incredulous Tortorella said to The Post. “They think we would do something like that? Come on.

“We were all concerned when we saw him go down like that. To think that anyone would think we would try to hurt someone by intentionally hitting him in the head . . . it’s unbelievable. This is a hockey game . . . to put someone’s health in jeopardy.”

The Devils have had better nights, that’s for sure. And now their hold on this series is in jeopardy with the prospect that Stevens may be sidelined for a while. Yes, Scott Gomez played 48 hours after sustaining what the team insisted was “whiplash,” in Game 1 against the Bruins, but there’s no guarantee that Stevens will be able to play in tomorrow night’s Game 4.

“Hopefully Scotty will be OK for whenever,” Daneyko said. “For the next one or whenever.”

Stevens has played in 137 consecutive playoff games since joining the Devils in 1991-92, missing an appreciable amount of time in only one of those matches. That was the third game of the 1995 first round when he suffered a first-period concussion after being slammed into the rear boards by Bryan Smolinski. The Devils lost that game, but won the next two with Stevens in the lineup for both.

Now, who knows? We are, after all, talking about a head injury, one so unsettling that it affected the minds of the Devils.